Keats's Ethical Poetics between Jakobson and de Man: Non-Egotism, Negative Capability, and the Poetic Function

Abstract

This paper repositions the modern stakes of Keats's ethical vision through the twin lenses of semiotics and deconstruction, taking non-egotism and Negative Capability as its pivots. It argues that Keats's bracketing of poetic subjectivity anticipates Roman Jakobson's account of the poetic function, the projection of equivalence from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination, and that it also offers a corrective to Paul de Man's reduction of Keats to "cognitive failure" and "rhetorical illusion." Through close readings of Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, and Lamia, the study shows how Keats, mediating perception through sensuous form, stages the persistent tension between aesthetic illusion and rational disenchantment while legitimating affect as a mode of meaning-production. Rather than evading self-reflection, Keats models a disciplined suspension of subjectivity that allows the poem's self-referential patterns and metonymic economies to generate ethical force beyond the individual. The paper concludes that Keats's practice exhibits genuine foresight: the "linguistic uncertainty" achieved by suspending certainty does not collapse into nihilism but reframes deconstructive undecidability as ethically productive, offering a path for contemporary theory to reconcile formal autonomy with ethical responsiveness.